Imagine that, if you will: given the tremendous amounts of money spent on paid search (huge! And costs are actually going up!), all it manages to do is achieve a Scrooge-ish +9% bump over organic search. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, you may well get a bigger conversion bang for the buck by investing in an organically planned architecture of scent, relevance and persuasion — which is what ends up scoring so well in organic search anyway — than in "buying" traffic for an otherwise cow-pathed site.

Retailers know how you'll approach a store, where you'll hesitate, how to affect your mood, how to pique your desires, how to play to your aspirations. Everything in a store, from lighting to floor color to music to how goods are displayed, is meant in some way to get you to not just shop, but spend.

"It's like a Broadway musical," says Deborah Mitchell, a marketing expert at the University of Wisconsin. "Nothing was put into that musical that wasn't thought through. It's the same in a highly orchestrated retail environment." Read the entire article.

Here is a cold harsh reality: The most beautifully designed website, the most stunning 2D visual product photos or otherwise simply look weak compared to to a well orchestrated onslaught of your 5 senses at a brick and mortar retail outlet. Online your visitors can't experience depth, texture, lighting, smells, noise ambience, and the list goes on.

Now don't take this as me telling you not to use images and pretty graphics, I am simply stating that focusing heavily on design may not deliver the conversions you hope for.

JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, even flash presentations are still only 2d, flat, and when compared with a broadway musical, they are boring.

So why do so many spend so much time debating, and hand wringing about
their site's visuals and graphics? Maybe they haven't heard.

What mental images are you building about your products/services in the mind of your visitors? Are you using a series of planned mental images to create an online customer experience not bound by a physical reality?

Novelists do it everyday,and the methodology exsists to plan this online.

"How do you use search to introduce the right buyers to the right sellers when it's not a frequent transaction of a commodity?" The responsibility is the sellers! . We invented Persuasion Architecture to present the answers the buyer seeks. Chapters 19-21 of "Waiting For Your Cat to Bark" tell you how...

Planning Persuasion Scenarios is the core of Persuasion Architecture and it ensures that that seller will leave a relevant scent of information based on answering each buyer's questions, addressing each need, each motivation, and even each buying preference. Whether the sale is complex or simple, whether the buyer is late or early in the process, whether the buyer is knowledgeable or ignorant, high price point or low, it doesn't matter. The seller must account for each customer segment and each angle of entry that customers may take as the need for your product arises.

It isn't easy, it's a lot of work. Every touchpoint, every page, every keyword, every marketing communication must be accounted for . Persuasion Architecture handles this complexity.

In today's landscape the seller is the only one with papable incentive to do the work of Persuasion Scenario planning, so it is unlikely that search or any other middle party will get too involved in solving this. And sellers selling these types of transactions simply can't afford to wait for search technology to solve this problem for them.

If users don't quickly see what they clicked on your ad to find, they'll leave your site frustrated and may never return to your site or click on ads in the future. Here are some pointers for making sure that doesn't happen:

Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information about the product or service in your ad.
Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad text.
Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content.
Try to provide information without requiring users to register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.
In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your ad does link to a page consisting of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalog page), provide additional information beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad.
You should have unique content (should not be similar or nearly identical in appearance to another site).

Starting with your ad, each interaction you have with your potential customers and customers should be geared towards building a trusting relationship. To avoid leading users astray:

Users should be able to easily find what your ad promises.Openly share information about your business. Clearly define what your business is or does.
Honor the deals and offers you promote in your ad.
Deliver products, goods, and services as promised.

The above is not ground breaking advice from a Conversion Rate specialist. The above is taken directly from the Google Adwords help center.

Basic, common sense, and sound advice for any Adwords advertiser to increase their conversion rate, right?

All these guidelines sound simple, not impossible, and stir up a resounding "Duhhh, of course we should be doing that" thought in your head right?

But why are so few doing it?

Is it the Diet Coke diet phenomenon? Are some advertisers thinking that if they order a triple deck burger, super large fries and a DIET coke that they are actually on diet?

Is PROVIDING RELEVANT AND SUBSTANTIAL CONTENT really that hard?

Well improving conversion IS alot like dieting, easy in concept(eat less, burn more calories), but a little bit more difficult in practice. Planning relevant, persuasive scenarios from an Adwords ad(driving point) to the landing page(funnel point) on through to the final conversion process(conversion beacon) is tough, daunting, and often complex work. Anything worthwhile usually is.

Whatever your website, I think you want better traffic, not more traffic.

You want to figure out why the right people will come, not build a sideshow that attracts exactly the wrong people.

At trade shows, there's always a few booths with magicians, fire-eaters or bikini-clad models. And post-show, there's no evidence at all to indicate that the noisy attractions did very much to improve the actual metrics of the booth.

So, maybe it doesn't matter how your site does compared to a site in a different category. What matters, I think, is how your site does compared to last week or last month, and what's happening to your conversion. Read Seth's entire post.

Agreed. We've been talking about his for quite a while.

Assuming your site's conversion rate is on par with the industry average(around 2%) be careful not to come to the conclusion that 98-97% of the traffic is the wrong people just because they don't convert. Don't run out willy nilly and try to find the 'right traffic'. Most of that good traffic might be right beneath your sniffer now. No matter how much of the 'right traffic' you have, your sight has to be just as right to make sure that 'quality' traffic gets the information they need, the way they need it.

It's not just quality of traffic, and like Seth points out, it's the quality of their experience with you and your brand. The quality of your persuasion scenario planning is what bridges the gap between you and your traffic's potential.

Today was a busy day in the office, and one in which meetings were back to back, to back. I started talking with my CFO, took a detour to meet with a potential partner, and ended the day spending time with some new (and potential) clients. Very different audiences, yet one common discussion kept popping up, and it comes as no real surprise, it comes up daily around us. The topic you ask- the difference between Conversion and Persuasion. The cognoscenti will recall we've been speaking and writing on the topic for some time, but it's worth reading Bryan's last article nonetheless. Here's a tidbit:

The linear conversion funnel has its place. Though rudimentary and limited, it a great blunt-force beginners' tool for online marketers with little or no metrics in place (and there are far too many of those left)...

...Instead of considering the conversion funnel by itself, we should think of it as living at the bottom end of the buy/sell process. Conversion is no longer the biggest problem facing online marketers; persuasion is.

Without persuasion, there's no incentive for visitors to walk through your linear sales process. Unlike conversion, persuasion isn't linear. The conversion funnel is smooth and simple, but the persuasive resevoir that feeds it is as complex and non-funnel-like as your visitors are.

Aroung here things are ramping up to a formidible buzz, well on their way to a fever pitch.

The book is being printed, videos are being recorded(for the DVD insert that will come with each book of course), promotion plans are being cemented up, and we are all preparing for the big release in June.

We've shared bit and peices and sometimes full drafts of the book with trusted friends and respected colleques, each one of them telling us to expect this book to be a runaway smash.

Still, we wanted to extend our 'inner circle', and meet a few more mareting and selling pioneers.

So right now Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg are banging out a new series of PPT files. They are creating a one time presentation, an abbreviated and super fiery special edition of their Wizards Of Web Seminar( you know the one that is usually sold-out months in advance).

Here is the situation. There is a limited number of seats available for this one time only event to be held at on the new Campus of Wizard Academy in Austin, TX on May 9-10. The cost is $1800 per person. (The 3 day course costs $3000, so that is a significant savings)

Not only will you get a cranium full of potent mojo to help you start thinking about Persuasion Architecture and what it could mean to your business online and off, you will also get a new preview copy of the book signed by the authors. We'll also give you 100 copies of the book when released to indoctrinate your friends, family and cats.

Citing WebTrends 2006 CMO Web-Smart Report, they report 84% of the CMOs surveyed rated their organization's ability to measure web marketing performance as having room for improvement, weak or non-existent.

“The challenge is due to a lack of consistent, goal-based metrics to
measure reach, frequency, and conversion across all online campaigns,”
said a spokesman for Web trends.

Another cause is
“the inability to target customers with relevant marketing and messages
due to siloed analysis; tools that only provide aggregated data such as
page views and visits,” he continued.

Uhh, sorry, no. Consistent, goal-based metrics? Who's goals? Report jockeys going to start creating more canned reports that measure my goal-based metrics? Forgive me for being skeptical, but it's not often good things are found in a can.

If that's not enough, they go on to blame the... tools? Many web analytics vendors have created fabulous tools for reporting and measuring the data collected by the medium. What other medium provides such ready access to a wealth of statistics? Those who heard me speak last week at Ad:tech 1mpact heard the line often, clicks are people, links are decisions.

These fabulous tools we have at our disposal measure the decisions our people/visitors/customers make when they engage with our persuasive system, or rather, our advertising, marketing, and website. They're limited in that by definition, they cannot come preloaded with our customers' motivations included- after all, they're our customers. We're responsible (by we, of course, I mean marketing not simply IT) to plan the experience each of our customer segments would prefer to engage in online. What questions they would ask? What information they would require? How would they prefer to interact with our site?

In short, we're planning what a successful scenario looks like because it's amazing how much less of the problem these analysis tools magically become when we feed them the plan we built in advance.